[re Terminator Salvation]
You'd think so. I haven't watched the disc yet (I saw the movie on a flight, which didn't really give me a full sense of the audio!)

In my database, for DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio this disc sits right on the border between the 16 bit and 24 bit titles.

But I have a theory that with most 24 bit titles, the 6, 7 or even 8 LSBs are random. Random material simply does not compress in DTS-HD MA, nor in Dolby TrueHD, because these are essentially predict-then-correct algorithms. You can't predict randomness, so the corrections are as large as the original data.

Now, we know that Terminator Salvation is a recent title, for which they presumably used state of the art equipment. What if they managed to push the noise (ie. randomness) floor so far down that only the 3rd or 4th least significant bits were random? That would yield a significantly lower bitrate, even though more might be happening.

Still, I think this is unlikely. Microphones and microphone amplifiers alone, if nothing else, add sufficient noise to a recording to randomise the bottom 7 or 8 bits out of 24.

Yeah, that is a bit weird - it seems that sex, lies and videotape may also have a 96kHz track.

I should be receiving my copy of The Professional tomorrow - it's been awhile since I've watched this and it's not clear to me whether I've actually seen the international cut, so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Yeah, that is a bit weird - it seems that sex, lies and videotape may also have a 96kHz track.

I should be receiving my copy of The Professional tomorrow - it's been awhile since I've watched this and it's not clear to me whether I've actually seen the international cut, so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Not wishing to colour your impressions, but I found the longer cut to be a mixed bag - it pretty much adds more character development and interaction at the cost of pacing.

I think both cuts are good, perhaps with a slight preference for the shorter one - maybe something in between would have been ideal

But I am almost completely certain that these are identical discs. Each of these discs has printed on its face the age classification for at least five different countries, and one of them I recognise to be the UK classification symbol. The disc sold in Australia for Part 1 has product code EU 114221 BLB on it.

Paku, if you have this disc to hand still, does it have the same product code and is there an Australian classification symbol printed on it? (In the centre of the row of five, 'MA' in a hexagon with '15+' next to it.)

It's looking increasingly likely to me that there are smallish variations in the whole disc byte count from computer to computer, from drive to drive. In the above examples, the differences are only 327, 583 and 336 bytes respectively, amounting to around one millionth of a per cent. Perhaps we should simply ignore disc size differences when there are only a few KB.

Wow, this is totally different to the US version shown on the front page, despite having the same distributor (local name notwithstanding). The only identical point is that the average bitrate for the main audio track is the same between both, but the MPEG4 AVC video has been created afresh at a significantly lower bitrate:

US: 37.838 Mbps
AU: 30.618 Mbps

The Australian version is a single disc with a couple of HD featurettes amounting to about 7GB, which clearly aren't on the US disc. In fact, I see from Amazon that the US version has two discs. Perhaps Paramount suspected that international sales would not justify premium 2-disc treatment of this title, to the point where it was worth paying to do a different encode.

It's looking increasingly likely to me that there are smallish variations in the whole disc byte count from computer to computer, from drive to drive. In the above examples, the differences are only 327, 583 and 336 bytes respectively, amounting to around one millionth of a per cent. Perhaps we should simply ignore disc size differences when there are only a few KB.

This may be the case, although there are enough exact to the byte correspondences between multiple submitters that it is hard to say for sure. Obviously, there is a noticeable ~10MB difference typically when AACS has been stripped (ala DVDBeaver numbers) when compared to a non-stripped scan, but at the same time I've come up with an exact match to numbers that had been posted to the list by benes before BDInfo was a twinkle in my eye on older, discounted disc releases that I've recently picked up.

Also I have not noticed any differences between my own scans of older releases that I have done in the past and rescans when testing BDInfo releases, so I don't believe there is any variation introduced by AnyDVD revisions. In any case, main playlist numbers are the most significant and I agree that when these are identical and the overall disc numbers are close, then the releases should be considered essentially identical. The byte differences may physically exist on a 1:1 comparison but do not mean much other than that the disc was "touched" between pressings.

Also I have not noticed any differences between my own scans of older releases that I have done in the past and rescans when testing BDInfo releases, so I don't believe there is any variation introduced by AnyDVD revisions. In any case, main playlist numbers are the most significant and I agree that when these are identical and the overall disc numbers are close, then the releases should be considered essentially identical. The byte differences may physically exist on a 1:1 comparison but do not mean much other than that the disc was "touched" between pressings.

I've had one case. I scanned the same 'Testmold' disc twice a couple of weeks apart because I was comparing it with an actual commercial disc (provided by 'James'). I mentioned it in this blog post thus:

Quote:

Thanks to James, it is here. I can say already that it measures virtually the same as my Testmold. All the above points are identical. The only difference is that BDInfo 0.5.2 tells me that James' purchased disc is 38,369,228,794 bytes in size, whereas my Testmold is 38,368,180,218 bytes in size. I'm not quite sure why yet. (Yet the plot thickens. Having just rescanned it, BDInfo now tells me that my Testmold is identical in size to the purchased disc! Same software, same drive, same computer. Just a couple of weeks apart.)

I doubt very much that it's BDInfo that's at issue. I suspect that if I had have used dir /s in a command window I probably would have come up with the same differences.

Perhaps AnyDVD HD might be the most plausible candidate for the change. I upgrade pretty much straight away whenever a new version becomes available, but it could be that the phantom files and directories and things that AnyDVD HD creates only change from time to time, not with every new version. I've just done a dir /s on Godfather Part 1.

Paku, if you have this disc to hand still, does it have the same product code and is there an Australian classification symbol printed on it? (In the centre of the row of five, 'MA' in a hexagon with '15+' next to it.

Yes, the discs have the multiple rating logos, and the same product code. I actually also happen to have an older scan of Part 1, done back in August with BDInfo 0.5.2, and it has a different size than the newer one I posted, namely the 49,326,206,530 bytes you quoted for the Australian version.

I still have the same drive, however since then I've updated the firmware, updated AnyDVD, and of course updated BDInfo to 0.5.3.

These sorts of questions remind me of my 'idea' to create some kind of hash code that is derived from the non-AACS files on a disc (and possibly their creation date) so that each disc can have a unique identifier that is consistent with AnyDVD enabled or not.

This kind of thing, while unlikely to be foolproof, should allow us to see if a disc has authoring differences from another, assuming that a re-encode would also require changes in non-AACS protected files.